Book: Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion Essay: “Introduction” (Ryan Conrad, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair, and Deena Loeffler) Published: 2014
Note: I was going to go into thoughts on some of the essays that were written in it, but I just don't care. My review of the book can be found here, including the questions that cause me to just... not care to engage with most anything here.
In many rural areas and major urban centers, like Chicago, public schools are being gutted in favor of private or charter schools, denying youth the chance at a quality public education and also denying workers the opportunity for jobs with union protection.
One of the things I find frustrating about this volume is this occasional focus on the importance of public schools while it also pushes for the “question the state” aspect. I'm very much on the side of questioning the state, but I don't understand why they do not apply this to the school (especially with regards to queer people within them, particularly queer students).
Hate crime legislation, which purports to provide fairness for minority communities, does nothing to address root causes of violence, and increases the scope of the prison industrial complex through extended sentencing. The end of DADT comes with the expansion of bloodthirsty imperialism and neocolonialism by the United States. At this time, American gay soldiers are celebrating Pride weekend in Afghanistan even as the same army continues blasting out the innards of a country already eviscerated by ruinous U.S. foreign policy.
All worth remembering.
Collectively, this anthology collects and presents forceful reminders that queer resistance is not only against the oppression of people defined as queer, but against all disenfranchisement, and that this resistance is not merely a pale version of free love but deeply embedded in the political legacies of Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, among many others. The resistance archived here does not merely shout out for sexual liberation, as important as that might be, but insists upon a radical political and economic reorientation of the world.
I know this was published in 2014, but I feel like we should question her work far more because of how she supported Sasha's relationship with a teenager while he was in his 30s. It's worth questioning the context in which they made their support of certain things known.
Additionally, every contributor to this anthology and every member of the small Against Equality collective is connected to projects that radically alter the political landscape. Whether we work on grassroots organizing against privatization of Chicago schools, the prison industrial complex, HIV/AIDS discrimination laws in Canada, health disparities in under-served communities, or ties between militarization and queer immigrant discourses in Arizona, our individual and collective work persistently points out alternatives to the privatized state and the brutality of the prison industrial complex and the military. In other words, we critique like our lives depend upon it.
Still wondering where the questioning for the school was.
Beyond access to online versus physical print media, there is an important point to be made regarding what we refer to as “seizing the means of production of knowledge.” Our three pocket-sized anthologies were self-published. This allowed us to work outside the typical academic or publishing industry timeline and also allowed [Against Equality], as an activist group with no profit motive, to maintain full control over the project. It allowed us to take online op-eds and blog posts, then put them into print where they became official knowledge; once in book form, the ideas presented together became reputable source material for scholarly research. University instructors are now teaching our work across the United States, Canada, and perhaps beyond. It is doubtful that this would have ever happened if these pieces remained a series of disconnected online materials. In short, once our work became official knowledge, the ideas and critiques presented in this anthology were gradually approached with more seriousness and given more weight. Instead of being isolated extremists nestled in the far corners of the Internet, we were a coherent and defiant set of voices demanding greater attention to the failures of mainstream gay and lesbian equality politics.
I think it's worth questioning that positioning of wanting to be part of academia. What does it mean when your work is pulled into academia? Even if it spreads the knowledge to people there (which is good), what happens to it? And how does that impact us? This questioning isn't positioned anywhere.